There are a lot of wins with the cloud, but for me hosting my personal server, most of them are fairly irrelevant (if not problematic). For example large systems will absolutely benefit more from cloud-based scaling than they'll suffer from slightly less reliable "servers". For a single-box personal setup, however, that's actually worse than physical hardware. Those risks are manageable and once under control even non-redundant, non-scaling setups are viable in the cloud once the bottom-edge of the price/performance curve is cost effective.

Bottom line is you can't run a reasonable dedicated box on EC2 for less than about $80 / month, so if you only need half those resources it's quite possible to get them for half the price somewhere else. Once you get to the point where cloud resources are cost effective, however, I think it's pretty much a no brainer to go that way unless you have some really specific needs for your infrastructure.

What was your main reason for switching to the cloud?
Cheaper? More resources? Better scaling? Cause all the cool kids are doing it?

I believe Baiduspider is a Chinese search engine bot.
They smash our sites, second only to the Googlebot.